jtickle14 hours ago
This seems exactly like the sort of shenanigan that would piss off rather than appease the wood spirits.
nkmnz12 hours ago
What’s next? Touch-grass-as-a-Service?
tdeck7 hours ago
There's already "After the Rapture Pet Care" which feels like a similar genre.
silveira12 hours ago
Blow a dandelion seed head and make a wish, but it’s a device blowing.
oriettaxx9 hours ago
as south European, I expect some volunteers for a planetary "touch balls"
stackghost3 hours ago
Touch *balls*?
cassepipe8 hours ago
drdaeman2 hours ago
Said to be an actual thing (rather than a gag collectible): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/26/zero-energy-co...
bitwize11 hours ago
A service to automatically throw St. Joseph's Day bread into someone's backyard
The Rabbit AI of this space: a wearable over-the-shoulder salt thrower that connects to a cloud API
aaron6956 hours ago
[dead]
weirdish14 hours ago
I'd only buy this if it included a subscription-based AI upsell to predict and adapt to my adjusting superstition needs over time
yetihehe14 hours ago
Knocking on wood was about knocking on unpainted wood, so that you have actual direct physical contact with wood. Remote knocking seems to go in the other direction...
thaumasiotes13 hours ago
> Knocking on wood was about knocking on unpainted wood, so that you have actual direct physical contact with wood.
How do you know this? For example, there is a wikipedia page section entitled "Origin of use in the English language"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocking_on_wood#Origin_of_use...
but the contents of that section make it extremely clear that no relevant facts are known to wikipedia.
yetihehea minute ago
I know it from Polish usage. In Polish it's "odpukać w niemalowane [drewno]"/"knocking on unpainted [wood]", wood is typically not spoken, the important part is that the wood is unpainted/raw. Superstitious people would especially leave the underside of table unpainted or leave some unpainted wood nearby in living room just for this occasion.
pessimizer9 hours ago
The contents of the article make it clear that "touch wood" is basically synonymous with "knock on wood," making the knocking less important than the touching.
But is is important to mention that a ctrl-f on that page for "unpainted" is proof that you didn't spend much time looking.
couchand11 hours ago
N >= 2
[deleted]8 hours agocollapsed
krunck14 hours ago
There are societies where rather than knocking on wood one turns one's head and spits. For example: "Grandad is looking well after his fall, let's hope that doesn't happen again. Ptew!"
Looking for this in app form.
random_cat_874513 hours ago
the true SaaS (Spit as a Service).
markdown12 hours ago
I'm imagining a thousand people in a spitshop in (Mechanical) Turkey in a sitting at desks with a spittoon, waiting for a signal to spit.
gexla4 hours ago
I wonder if I could create a full time job for myself tossing salt over my shoulder.
psadri9 hours ago
Whoever created this - you are the crazy kind of person I want to meet in real life.
skinfaxi13 hours ago
Found this other experiment, part of the same series "Machines Responding to Superstitions".
https://www.dezeen.com/2023/10/31/kinky-kashayam-portable-bl...
Though it seems less like machine response than humans integrating technology into superstitious belief.
TehCorwiz14 hours ago
If an app knocks on a tree and nobody is around…
jagged-chisel11 hours ago
… go on
Isamu7 hours ago
Wait, is the tree in a VM?
merek7 hours ago
...does it still display ads?
dr_pyser7 hours ago
I never had to knock on wood
petters37 minutes ago
Me neither knocks on wood
gosen13 hours ago
I can't explain why but it's amazing! Maybe because in my culture "knocking on the wood 3 times" helps to avoid the bad luck and I lived with that for 20 years, or maybe it's just fun to imagine that you're knocking on the wood remotely ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
dvh14 hours ago
It's like FakeBlock from Arrested development
fancyswimtime12 hours ago
knock on cousin remotely
itissid14 hours ago
I am ratting this out to the Tree Beard
Cpoll13 hours ago
Looking forward to one that will let me touch grass from my computer.
ButlerianJihad12 hours ago
Nothing can surprise me. Every day at college, I would walk past these "Trees".
https://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/artist/allen.html#about-th...
lofaszvanitt13 hours ago
You have to do it with a right hand, from under. So this is 100% fake.
classified14 hours ago
The knockers are missing solar panels to continuously charge their batteries. So there will be sustained costs to keep them running. And how water-proof are they? Apart from that, it's going to sell like hot cakes.
tinyplanets14 hours ago
Or just, you know, walk outside in the fresh air, find a nearby tree, and knock on it...
dimatter14 hours ago
r/whoosh
slipperybeluga10 hours ago
[dead]